Charlotte Raven on resurrecting the feminist bible 'Spare Rib'

Charlotte Raven, bad girl of 1990s journalism, is back in the spotlight and on
a mission to resurrect the feminist bible 'Spare Rib', while also learning
to live with an incurable disease. She talks to Julia Llewellyn-Smith

In the 1990s Charlotte Raven was one of the queens of New Britannia, a linchpin of the glamorous gang at the short-lived, much-hyped Modern Review magazine that applied academic analysis to pop-cultural icons such as Cindy Crawford and Iron Maiden.

The clique, including Toby Young and Julie Burchill (Raven had affairs with both), drank Bolly and – by their own admission – snorted cocaine at the Groucho Club, while discussing Marxist interpretations of Madonna’s lyrics.

Two decades later Raven has returned, having announced that she is to relaunch the counterculture feminist magazine Spare Rib, which was founded in 1972 and closed in 1993.

‘I wanted to launch a magazine to voice my frustrations with feminism, but I had bad memories of Spare Rib,’ she says in her slow, contralto tones, which lend her a venerable and slightly intimidating air.

‘When I came across it in the 1980s it looked ugly, it was slightly earnest, very predictable, a bit square. But then I looked at copies from the 1970s in the Women’s Library and saw it was once very beautiful, witty, all the things I wanted a magazine to be. I thought, “Why not relaunch it?” and there’s been this incredible response.’

Raven is drinking espresso and chain-smoking in her garden in an at once scruffy yet middle-class corner of north London. A child’s swimming-costume hangs on a washing-line above us, at the kitchen table her newly recruited deputy is tapping on a laptop.

‘A French television crew came to film us the other day, expecting bustling offices, and were taken aback by the reality,’ she hoots.

A cover of Modern Review from 1997

Since her glory days Raven has got married – to the documentary-maker Tom Sheahan – and had two children, Anna, eight, and John, three. She has also learnt that she is carrying the gene for Huntington’s, an incurable, hereditary disease that normally takes hold in the carrier’s late thirties or early forties. Raven is 43 and the discovery has given her new impetus.

‘It’s the acme of a midlife crisis writ large,’ she says without self-pity. ‘Normally people get to my age and start worrying they haven’t done everything they set out to do, but if you get to my age and find out you might not live very much longer then it brings the whole thing into view. In my twenties I was so ungrounded; well, this looming presence is certainly grounding.’

In many ways, Raven seems to be atoning for her youthful hedonism. Back in the day she wore nothing but black Issey Miyake; now she’s make-up free, in a girlish, checked dress (‘I can’t stand black anymore’) revealing endless gangly – and waxed – legs.

The politics of beauty is one of the many feminist issues haunting Raven. She’s given up on cosmetics, which, she says, always made her feel ‘odd and uncomfortable’, but still draws the line at hairy ankles.

‘I’ve only recently stopped having bikini waxes,’ she confesses. ‘God almighty, I only ever started having them by accident. The people who wax my legs would say, “Why don’t you?” I ended up being properly Brazilianed – just agony! It was very unnerving, but if it happened to me I can see it’s going to happen to a lot more people with a lot more peer pressure.’

Such dilemmas will be at the heart of Spare Rib (slogan: Life – not Lifestyle), which shortly will be launched as a website, with a glossy magazine to be published biannually, out in the autumn.

Spare Rib in it's heyday

Raven insists its place in newsagents will be besides Cosmo, rather than in ‘carousels in Whole Foods next to Green Parent’. But how will she not alienate women, like me, who’d love the witty, intelligent magazine she promises but who also don’t want to be made to feel inferior because they like clothes and shave their armpits?

‘We won’t make our readers feel inferior,’ Raven promises. ‘They can’t be held accountable for the ills of society. Anyway, I empathise completely with them. I’ve wrestled with all these things myself. I’ve been obsessed with clothes and my hair. But it didn’t make me happy. The hidden truth is that consumerism isn’t a path to fulfilment. Suggesting that it may not be is not to cast judgment.’

Raven’s cagey about the magazine’s content but reveals a male contributor will write about his love of pornography, and a feminist about her passion for slasher films. ‘They’ll be pieces showing how we’re conflicted to the core – but not encoded in this consumerist idea of conflicts as guilty pleasures. I can’t stand that.’

Being funded by advertising, most magazines have to push consumerism. Spare Rib, however, will be financed by donations from what Raven calls ‘grass roots’ members. Subscribers will have access to Spare Rib events – defined vaguely for now as parties (Raven has made a tongue-in-cheek promise that the boorish columnist Rod Liddle and the MP George Galloway will be ‘costumed penitents’ serving cocktails) and consciousness-raising groups.

‘This model releases you from the necessity of looking for handouts from rich people,’ she says. ‘Initially, I thought we needed a wealthy patron. I went to see [the publisher] Felix Dennis and what a humiliating thing that was, sitting there in his horrible, great bachelor pad surrounded by golden lions and a library with a false wall. I realised this had always been the problem with radical magazines – they’ve always ended up having to be in this position of supplication. Anyway, Dennis ended up reading out all his poems, so I didn’t even get the chance to talk about Spare Rib, which he thought was doomed. I thought how much nicer to have people buy into the idea that our independence is ensured by them and that it’s a really meaningful relationship.’

So far, cash has flooded in. An editorial board of journalists and feminists is being appointed, and meetings are booked with Spare Rib’s co-founders Marsha Rowe and Rosie Boycott. ‘We’ve raised £20,000 in the past three days and had all these lengthy epistles. People are so pleased to be consulted.’

Raven was born in Streatham, south-east London (‘a —hole, full of dog— and flashers’). Her father set up a magazine for the duty-free trade. ‘He sold it for a stack of cash, so we were working-class but ended up rich. My mum [now dead] was a radical Marxist and we used to slag off Dad for his capitalism, which I feel guilty about now. We were kind of allies: she joined the Militant Tendency [a Trotskyist group within the Labour Party] at the same time as I did, so we were in these weird Marxist sects together.’

After much mischief-making at her private day school and Manchester University, where she immersed herself in student politics (‘all machinations, totally egotistical’), Raven found a job as editorial assistant at the new Modern Review, whose strapline was ‘low culture for high brows’.

‘I wrote a horrible letter to Toby Young about the magazine when he was editing it and he gave me a job. I must have realised this was the way to pitch my relationship with him, that he was a masochist. I don’t see Toby anymore, but I’m very, very fond of him.’

A brief fling with Young (now pioneer of the West London Free School) was followed by a full-blown, highly publicised affair with Burchill, the co-founder. The pair posed for moody photos dressed all in black and clearly revelled in their notoriety. Raven has since described Burchill a ‘narcissist before narcissism was fashionable’.

Raven with Julie Burchill. Credit: POLLY BARLAND

She sighs. ‘Julie… It’s so hard to describe… All I can say is we went to see the film Heavenly Creatures [a true story about two teenagers’ intense friendship, culminating in a murder] on our first date and it was weirdly prophetic.

We ended up having a relationship in a fantasy world. We were inhabiting a parallel universe that seemed incredibly real, but it was a chimera. I was always getting into these little cabals with a powerful person. My mother and I had this very intense relationship, which wasn’t entirely healthy, and I tried so hard to replicate it with other people.’

She and Burchill plotted to oust Young and in 1995 he closed the magazine in what they claimed was a fit of pique. They split up after six months, by which time Burchill was having an affair with Raven’s younger brother, whom she later married. (Raven waves questions about this away.)

In 1997 the magazine was revived briefly with her at the helm, but it lasted only five issues. ‘I was at my most hubristic. I blew all the cash on huge offices. It was all just an endless party.’

It’s not the only experience to have chastened Raven. After her wild twenties, motherhood came as a shock. ‘I felt very isolated, on my own with children. My father’s ill [with Huntington’s], my mother-in-law lives just too far away to be able to help. It’s bloody hard and that’s what’s happening to so many women, because the idea of the nuclear family means you have to be on your own with children. Using the magazine to explore alternatives to that is very exciting to me.’

‘I’m just so grateful to have found Tom, he’s unbelievable. We’ve been married 10 years and I love it. My devotion to him is unwavering. It took me by surprise, really. I used to think if a man was clever he’d be dysfunctional, so I went out with men who were horrible to me. I thought if someone was going to be responsible and caring they’d be a wimp. But Tom is clever and not mad at all; he’s just the best-adjusted person I’ve ever met. He does all the cooking and much more of the childcare than I do. I’m so lucky to have someone who just defies all the conventions.’

Their marriage, I imagine, would certainly have been tested after Raven’s discovery in 2006 that she was carrying the Huntington’s gene. Symptoms of the disease include loss of motor skills and of the capacity to swallow (sufferers often die of malnutrition), and aggressive behaviour.

Immediately after her diagnosis, Raven decided that she would commit suicide, investigated all the methods and wrote a letter to her daughter, then her only child, explaining her choice. ‘I wanted to save me from the embarrassment of finding my self-image as a witty sophisticate no longer “matched” the reality,’ she once wrote. ‘Suicide is very alluring,’ she says now. 'It's a denial of death, of not allowing death to come to you, of defining your moment.’

She changed her mind after visiting a community of Huntington’s sufferers in Venezuela. ‘I saw those people living entirely undignified – by any stretch of the imagination – lives, in a terrible way, and yet they were still able to engage with their families. That’s what makes Huntington’s different from Alzheimer’s and that’s what made me realise you can’t kill yourself as long as that thing’s there.’

She tilts her face up at the spring sunshine. ‘There’s no way of putting a positive spin on it, but Spare Rib does make me feel there’s something blooming in the middle of all this. My dad can’t talk anymore, but when I told him he did a big thumbs-up. If you’re thinking that these years might be your last you need to think how to spend them. It’s not right to say that this is an antidote to Huntington’s, but what’s been haunting me has been in my own head. The more worried I am about the future, the more I don’t want to be on my own. I need the common bonds of humanity.’